According to Blizzard, allowing players to try out new content from the classic MMO version of World of Warcraft on a Public Test Realm (PTR) before launch is a radical change, and there’s a reason for it.

The third phase of World of Warcraft’s Season of Discovery has already begun, and this time there was no PTR, but everyone jumped into the unknown, which means there will be some things that won’t work at first. Assistant Production Director Clayton Stone explained why Blizzard changed its usual practice of using the PTR:

“I think our whole team was very happy with not having PTRs. It was a radical change. Keeping that level of mystery and discovery for the Season of Discovery, with each phase that we roll out, has really created a moment each time for the entire player base to come together and experience something new together. I recognize, and I think our players recognize, that there’s definitely an experimental nature to the whole season. Players are also a little bit open to us experimenting or things not working out exactly as we intended.

We’re able to jump right in and make fixes and evolve. Sometimes our ambitions exceed our technical capabilities or the way WoW was originally designed, especially Classic WoW. Even though we’re trying to run it on modern code, we still have things like layered challenges that pop up around some of our PvP events. I feel very fortunate that we are still able to roll those out, and then the team has been so quick to respond to problems. We’ve been able to make really quick tweaks to improve the player experience or to improve some of these technical challenges that, unfortunately, don’t really show up until after we release them to all the players around the world.

It’s this sense of discovery in the world. It’s been a solved game for so long, and we’re saying there are these really powerful secrets out there to find. We’re not going to tell them where they are, and while some players are looking at things like data mining to try to figure it out, they’re still hidden out there. We just loved seeing the way that players would sometimes band together in the game and try to find all the rooms or secrets that were specific to a particular class and try to uncover them all. We’re always really happy when players discover them, even if it’s a little later in the season – which it usually isn’t because our players are smart,” Stone said.

According to Nora Valletta, lead software engineer, it’s a win-win situation because the players like it and they learn from it. And really, the unknown is more likely to attract players…

Source: PCGamer